Category Archives: 66

Letter from Keith “Malik” Washington, in Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Nov. 2014) Comrades: Prison conditions in Texas are horrible. Now we are delving into the deep nuances of the “Happy Slave” mentality, which is so very pervasive … Continue reading →

By Mujahid Farid and Laura Whitehorn The Crisis: → The number of aging people in New York State prisons is skyrocketing, confining thousands of seniors to cruel and degrading conditions. → The number of incarcerated people ages 50+ in New … Continue reading →

By Suren Moodliar On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, activist-scholar Michelle Alexander counseled all of us to “connect the dots,” and speak out about militarism, mass surveillance and mass incarceration. To her list, the Freedom and Unfreedom … Continue reading →

By Inez Hedges American film, whether documentary or fiction, has been relatively silent about the enormous prison population in the United States. The groundbreaking documentary was no doubt Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 exposé in Titicut Follies of the shocking conditions in … Continue reading →

By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson [Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is Defense Minister of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter (not to be confused with the “New Black Panther Party”). After 20 years in Virginia prisons, he was “interstate compacted” … Continue reading →

By Angela Y. Davis Why did mass incarceration rise in the US and what are its political uses? What we refer to as mass incarceration reflects the soaring prison population and the prison construction boom that coincided with the rise … Continue reading →

By Steve Martinot This article will consider three topics: the existentiality of imprisonment, what the nature of the prison system reveals about the US as a colonialist society, and finally, some aspects of the prison abolition movement and what kinds … Continue reading →

By Vijay Prashad Hope and Change The jobless men stood Looking out the windows At the machines dying Like living things out there. — Charles Bukowski, “We Ain’t Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain” (1990) Abstractions are important, … Continue reading →

By Nyle Fort I first heard Mumia’s voice when I took Dr. Mark Taylor’s “Systematic Theology” class my first semester at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mumia was sitting on death row, and had been for nearly 30 years—longer than I’d been … Continue reading →

By déqui kioni-sadiki & Sekou Odinga “America means prisons,” said Black Nationalist Pan-Africanist leader Malcolm X in a television interview some fifty years ago. It wasn’t about crime he was talking. A similar sentiment was shared by Frederick Douglass less … Continue reading →